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Check&Get support - THREAD UPDATED

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Darwin:
I'm fighting mad. Mean, mad, vicious  >:(. Grrr... Hear me roar!

Check&Get is a very useful app. Unfortunately, suggestions for improvements and feature requests are met with stony silence.

Ken and I collaborated on a polite, and overwhelmingly positive, e-mail in which we enumerated perhaps five areas that we felt could be improved in Check&Get 3 and I submitted it under my name to the developer via the support form on his website. Silence. We waited a week and then I submitted the same e-mail directly to his support e-mail address, writing from my own e-mail address - the one that he should have on file as I used it to register Check&Get. Another week has passed and we have yet to receive so much as a "thank you for contacting support" canned response. This is both disappointing and infuriating. Considerable time has been spent using the application, more time spent thinking about ways that it might be improved, and yet more time composing a tactful and positively framed e-mail to suggest ways in which Check&Get might leave the ranks of the merely "good" or "adequate" and join the ranks of "must have" software. No one at Check&Get can even be motivated to send us an e-mail telling us to mind our own business, and yet that is the message that has been delivered.

I hope that the developer has been unable to check his website/e-mail for a few weeks and that this poor showing is aberrant and not indicative of an attitude that is hostile to constructive criticism. I know that the developer has been active here in the past, posting under the username dis and seemed quite receptive to suggestions.

dis, if you're still monitoring these forums, how do you respond?

Pissed in Courtenay.

Darwin:
FWIW, here's the list of things we sought to "improve":

First, it would be nice to see an implementation of "live", progressive search in Check&Get. I have really appreciated this feature in applications such as Maxthon 2, Evernote and Directory Opus. It would be far less cumbersome than the present requirement that the user bring up a search window, specify criteria, initiate it, etc.

I love the ability to mark sites as read. What I miss is the abiiity to mark sites that I have clicked on as "unread" a la E-mail clients such as Outlook. Often I have over 30 sites to review in Check&Get and I'll click on one link but get distracted by something else that catches my eye. By the time I finish with the distraction I forget what I was looking at. If I could select a hotkey to mark a link unread before I migrate away from it this wouldn't be a problem.

Another useful feature would be a context menu item or a toolbar button instructs Check&Get to check just my hot sites. This way, I don't have check them all (I have 216 sites that I track) and I don't have to manually select the hot sites from amongst my 20 or so folders.

On the subject of folders, I'd like to be able create folders like the default ones, such as Hot Sites ("Marked"), Changed, Checking Now, etc. What I would like is the ability to create additional folders and then specify criteria for them, so that when I click on that folder, it shows the bookmarks that meet the criteria that I have set. I guess this is a bit like tagging.

Another request is to add the ability to monitor changes to FTP sites. This would be a big time saver, though I realise that it would require that Check@Get have some sort of facility to use my credentials to log-in.

Is it possible to have Check&Get ignore parts of web pages for the purposes of reporting sites as changed but still have those changes highlighted, so that when the part of the page that I AM monitoring changes and I am alerted to it, I can see what else has changed as well?

I'd like to be able to specify criteria for what I consider to be a duplicate URL  - such as anything from the same base domain, etc. Another thing I'd like to be able to modify is when the time cycle begins, so I might set it to check a particular site at 6 am, rather than just specifying how often it is checked.

Quite a few of the sites that I monitor return errors and I have to manually reselect them and check for changes. Is it already possbile to set a delay and then have Check&Get automatically recheck them? If not, could this be added? It would be very useful.

I'd like Check&Get to automatically display the first highlighted change in a page when it opens the snapshot up in the browser tab and then, at the press of a hotkey, move to the second change, and so on. Website Watcher has this feature and it is extremely handy. Basically, once you've examined the first change, you can have it take you directly to the next change so that you don't need to wade though all the text that has not changed. This makes it really simple to see what has changed and where those changes are. I realize that a workaround for this exists in the form of using the "Report of Changes" tab, but it is often difficult to appreciate the changes when you are not able to view them in context, and switching back and forth between the two tabs and manually scrolling through the page can be cumbersome on large and involved websites.

Finally, I recall being able to turn on/off the pop-up notification that appears when a webpage has changed. I like the visual notification but find the fact that Check&Get steals the focus of my computer really annoying. I use TweakUIXP to disable focus stealing but the setting never "sticks" (that is, I have to go in and reset this every time) and I often forget to do it. I'd like to first ask if the option to disable the notifications is still available (I can no longer find it) and if so, how do I access it? Second, I'd like to request that there be an option added to a future release to limit Check&Get's popups from stealing focus. This way, I can have my cake and eat it too - have the notification popup without it stealing focus.

Anyone else who uses Check&Get have any comment/anything to add?

KenR:
As Darwin said, he and I collaborated on this, so obviously my feelings are similar. I have sent several messages to the developer and it appears I might just as well have given the feedback to one of my dogs. As with Darwin, I received no response to any of the messages I sent. This is particularly surprising given this quote from the developer:

...
Any suggestion of user interface improvements are welcome! I am contantly working on improving the user interface and appreciate any help and suggestions.

Sincerely yours,
Dmitry Skorniakov,
http://ActiveURLs.com
-dis (April 06, 2005, 06:45 AM)
--- End quote ---

It's really too bad. Check & Get's design is solid and it does a number of things well. The program needs work to transform it from basic to refined though. It lacks a number of features and several existing ones could be implemented considerably better. Hopefully, something better will come along soon.

Ken

justice:
It's summer-time, maybe the developer is on holiday at the moment?

arunpawar:
Maybe your ISP can tell you from which IP address this messg came then you have to ask thier ISP to trace this GUY at the end hurt that person its that simple  :D well its not it ill take months for this. 8)

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